Towards a sociomaterial approach to understanding irrigated land tenure

Building on the contributions to the thematic issue of Cahier Agricultures entitled "Irrigated Land Tenure: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development", this introductory article proposes to see "irrigated land tenure" through a socio-material lens. This approach draws on the concept of assemblage and conceives irrigated land tenure as an entity "in its own right" that results from relations and daily practices of bricolage deployed by different actors embedded in multi-level networks. The socio-material approach instantiates irrigated land tenure as an ever-shifting entity that is both discursive and empirical, and that evolves through constant recombination between water(s), land(s), crops and infrastructures but also the imaginary, discourses, and global political economy of irrigation. From an analytical point of view, such socio-material approach is a relational approach based on the idea that (natural) resources are not a given but "become" through a series of relations and practices. In such perspective, irrigated land tenure, that is, an ever-shifting socio-material assemblage, becomes a resource "in its own right" rather than through water, land, crops and infrastructures. This is maybe where our proposition differs from most of the literature on irrigated land tenure that takes these entities as their starting point of analysis.